The French Architecture Academy destined the Palmarès Gold Medal to the career of Mauricio Rocha and Gabriela Carrillo. This is the starting point of this conversation. It covers the interest this duo has in an unnoticed architecture, but with a political stance. They talk about dignity in living and the crisis that deforms us today. Gabriela remembers Pina Bausch and Mauricio, Tarkovsky’s work.
The shape, says Rocha, is the least important thing in architecture. Shape has no place in this conversation either.
NURIA OCAÑA: What has changed in your perspective on architecture from your early days to the present?
MAURICIO ROCHA: I was somewhat reluctant to study architecture. I used to compare it to other arts, which also interested me, and in which the creative process does not depend on an economic proposal or a client. I thought that architecture was a character that does not dare to be an artist; who lives art in some way, but ends up being corporate. But as time went by, through study, when I built my first house… I discovered that the creative process is something you decide and that the freedom to create is a discipline you have to acquire. It has a price. It involves creating a studio, a workshop, differently; where there is a priority on the creative side. But that is what shapes your client’s profile.
There is a constant conversation in our team on how to approach the work. Drawing out conclusions takes us a lot of time and that has made us understand that the form is the last thing in architecture. It is a consequence of the most important matter, which is discipline. This trade is about getting in deep. Then, it is feasible that architecture is an author work, a reflection on this interior world we try to translate in each work, as other arts do.
GABRIELA CARRILLO: It was the opposite than Mauri for me. I always had wanted to become an architect. What has deformed undoubtedly is the meaning of doing architecture.
Reality offers an approach in which being an architect means constructing buildings, rising walls, to lift things. To me, that condition has dematerialized. Doing architecture is perhaps more connected to having almost nothing, to undo before building.
In the end, this has to do with what Rocha says, there is a deep spirit that chases space. Spatial construction is a manipulation of what already exists. It is turning around, watching a place, and understanding through which minor actors you can do that articulation, that transformation, so men can inhabit.
There is where I find a universe of difference against that vision, perhaps a more capitalist one, about having to build something. It’s the contrary. Not seeing the light, seeing the darkness; not seeing the built wall, but rather the hole that is left to reach another place. This has been a dramatic change from when I started studying architecture, more than 20 years ago.
MR: And to avoid being condemned with a style, which is always a risk, we have learned that one of the great ways is to walk separately from the guild. There is a very strong relationship with our architect friends; but if we manage to establish a connection with other fields of knowledge, the conversation runs deeper. We are interested in the intangible, which is the experience itself, and for that we try to listen to philosophy, literature, to other sciences.
Saint-Exupéry used to say that behind every man he saw a Mozart. It is that creativity, call it art or not, what society needs to be different. -Mauricio Rocha
NO: How can you promote the awareness of dignity in spaces?
GC: When I think about how to communicate the value of spatial dignity as a key principle we should all follow, speaking about the character of the public and private work is fundamental. Making public works has allowed us to observe a diversity of minds, lifestyles, and places.
When we worked on the San Pablo Oztotepec market in 2001, the client was not the government, but the tenant. All the meetings and approvals depended on the tenants. It was lovely. We didn’t have to get answers from a delegate, but from the poultryman, the butcher… It was fascinating to see how we were worried about the way our work, contemporary architecture, was to be digested by people who has a different type of training, while their demands were that the smells had a way out, to leave the rain outside, that the wind would not blow the structure away… We had to direct our concerns elsewhere. They were not interested if it was contemporary, traditional, or not. There were a series of fundamental values for them, which you also have to acknowledge.
When we worked on the penal courthouse, we spoke to judges who asked for transit space where they didn’t have to walk in front of the defendants, since they were afraid they would be thrown things at. Here, dignity is reflected in the articulations you have to design because you don’t know if the defendants are innocent or guilty, if judges are being targeted by their families.
Working on projects of any nature, anywhere, opens a vision for you on how to approach this so fundamental aspect that is dignity. As human beings, we tend to get used to things that were poorly made, but the moment when the basic principle of inhabiting is restored, becomes clear, which has been forgotten due to everyday life, density, and the city itself.
MR: Clients always presents a program, but you finish building it along with them. The transit you recognize and which you add is what makes good architecture, and this is how you understand that architecture must have both an ethical and a political stance.
The moment we adopt a stance, we understand that architecture must stand up for dignity in the way every person lives. That is its importance. It cannot be seen, but it is what we should protect to death.
We are interested in the risk of architecture going unnoticed. Then, how do you make people become sensitive to this dignity? Why should they turn to see a building that goes unnoticed? In our experience, people who live in a place and are moved by it, talk about it, recommend it. They don’t talk about going to see a column or arch, but about visiting that place because they live well there.
If we manage to transmit that, we are adding to what the civil society should do in all cities, which is to fight for spaces to be decent.
Add the deformation of time in every work, the transit with which you compose. Architecture’s raw materials are space and time. -Gabriela Carrillo
NO: Which architectural transformations does today’s society demand?
MR: I read somewhere that the good ideas cease to be so and become a problem when they turn into something that is marketable. The topic of sustainability, for example, is essential throughout history. Today, it is something we talk about, people are aware of it, but when sustainability is sold in stores, then it becomes superficial and stops fulfilling its own function. Stupid green walls are being sold, which are useless, when in fact, you must build oxygenation for the city, for which there are many ways.
GC: And something has moved, without a doubt. The needs of the post-war era last century led to develop modernism and to have an own vision. The interesting thing is that, in the end, architecture is also a manifest of what is happening socially, politically, and economically. Following that line, there are always more thoughts than movement. It is the way of acting that makes you modern. Meaning, it is not modern architecture, but rather there is modernity to begin with. There is an obliged deformation.
One of the dominant conditions today is the speed information travels at. Gropius used to say “if I had known Japanese architecture, my work would have been entirely different”. Now, communication, the media, accessibility, the immediateness deform the means naturally.
There is also the fact that we live in crisis. It is not the crisis from the Cold War, it is the environmental crisis, of social values. Perhaps we (Mexico) have it very close because we live in a country with constant crisis. Look at the works that were made 20 or 30 years ago in Europe, with money, with resources, where there is a will to exaggerate and make things obvious; while here, we rely on intelligence. Do you have just three pesos? In two days? Here, there is always a problem with time, money, standards. Such crisis is increasingly less local and more global, it leads you towards having a different view of modernity.
MR: Something interesting, as Gabriela says, is the crisis in the western world, from 2008 to now, in the United States and later in Europe. It made people double think when making great buildings to transform cities because the money ran out.
That whole generation of architects didn’t know what to do against this situation. We in Mexico, Latin America, Africa, Asia have worked with the crisis muscle. It is not surprising that today, the western side of the developed world, is interested in the architecture we have managed to do in such tight budgets.
This goes back to the intangible, the experience has to do with thinking, with reflection, and not necessarily with money. Perhaps the crisis is good in that sense; because, as long as it is not sold in stores, it manages to make people think again. It is about setting an order for it to happen. These are countries with tremendous poverty, but with a great cultural dignity, which, when polluted with all that western culture, start to deform and to forget that things worked just fine.
The construction of new cities, new districts, should not forget about the dignity which has been reached many times; it should be able to take it to that new vision.
NO: Is it hard to maintain such respect under the values that rule today?
MR: Well, we have to understand that 95% of architecture throughout history has been not made by architects, but by people themselves. The way bees make their beehives. Construction is an organic condition. And self-construction, in many cases, creates places, which are so wonderful, just as the ones created before.
As architects, we have to learn not to want to do everything. To forget about that stupid idea of modernity, of creating a whole and controlled city. We have to understand that it is our role to do acupuncture. But in order to do so, as it happens in this eastern medicine, we need to know the complete organism and only touch certain spots so the flows can happen.
There is a great need to do little, as Gabriela said, but that little requires a lot of thinking time. That is how you become an accomplice of a society’s organic complexity. That is why the imposition of architecture cannot happen. But, how many architects do so? Very few, because it involves time that nobody pays for and that goes against the idea of architecture being sold in stores.
NO: If you weren’t doing architecture today, what would you do?
MR: I was lucky that in college, one of my teachers, Humberto Ricalde, didn’t want to be an architect either; he wanted to become a writer. I wanted to make movies. Then I did photographs, I entered the world of contemporary art… I have touched many sides that involve the creative part, but architecture has fulfilled me.
I am convinced that if one becomes a filmmaker, an architect, a photographer, a writer… the content will be the same, because it is the result of the research that backs you up. It is the books you read, what you see, where you walk, who you talk to, what you reflect on; and the only thing that changes is the tool. The thing you find most useful in order to be able to speak and offer something.
What I liked most about these disciplines, the axis, was the creation of atmospheres. And that wouldn’t change, even if I had made movies in Tarkovsky’s style.
GC: I agree with that basic essence of spatial construction. I think about the things that fascinated me and I wanted to become a ballet dancer, obsessively. Today, I see Pina Bausch’s work, for example, and there is a very powerful spatial construction there, which moves me and connects me with what I do.
My other addiction is fashion and there are also common points there. The ability to use the body as an expression space, of adding elements that deform it, which transform your aesthetic, your proportion, which link it to the environment it is in. There is also a very strong construction here. It’s the same principle, but in my case, taken to a corporeal scale.
